About Us

Our purpose

The purpose of the Realising Rights consortium is to address the factors underlying the persistent low priority given to sexual and reproductive health and rights in policy and practice.

Our approach

The consortium brings together a strong multidisciplinary research and service delivery partnership to work with policy and advocacy constituencies. Together, we will work to counter the silence on sexual and reproductive health and rights by:

• I mproving the evidence base on the high levels of sexual and reproductive health morbidity and mortality, and investigating the extent and nature of unmet needs.
  
• Researching innovative ways to improve access to low cost technologies and services for men and women in poor countries.
  
• Helping to build national capacity to put sexual and reproductive health on the policy agenda and make these rights a reality.

In order to achieve this, the Realising Rights consortium will:

• Generate new empirical findings on important gaps in sexual and reproductive health problems.
  
• Improve conceptual understanding of the links between poverty, the distribution of sexual and reproductive health morbidities and behavioural and political economy influences on access to services, technologies and rights.
  
• Develop new methodologies, combining quantitative and qualitative data, for measuring and mapping variables affecting sexual reproductive health and rights.
  
• Develop new knowledge and practice related to sexual and reproductive health services and technologies through research on innovative, scaleable ways of reaching poor and vulnerable groups.
  
• Use links to policymakers and advocates to influence the implementation of rights-based approaches to sexual and reproductive health.
  
• Focus on those with greatest access and entitlement problems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia – the very poor, young people and other hard-to-reach groups, such as migrants, indigenous populations and those most vulnerable to stigma.

Funding

The Realising Rights consortium is a five year programme of work funded by the UK Department for International Development.